Vladimir Sorokin. The Ice Trilogy

Children of Ice... They can communicate with each other without words, they have infiltrated every country and every organization, they want to destroy anyone who differs from them. Three vivid, shocking, and masterfully crafted novels from one of the greatest troublemakers in Russian literature. Any work by Vladimir Sorokin inevitably causes a real storm, and not just in literary circles. His polemical, shocking, and unconventional novels evoke a wide range of emotions, from admiration and adoration to rejection and profound indignation. And absolutely, no matter your attitude toward Sorokin's work, this trilogy is unmissable when studying contemporary literature. The story of a cosmic substance that fell to Earth along with a meteorite, and the people awakened by this substance, is profound, grotesque, and full of allusions, in Sorokin's signature style. There's a secret order of superhumans who consider everyone else "meat machines," a clash between elitism and consumer society, and political satire. The sublime rubs shoulders with the base, the sacred with the carnal, and the boundaries of what's acceptable, like the concept of normalcy, are blurred to the extreme. And, of course, there are the traditional hallmarks of Sorokin's prose: superb style, vivid dialogue, and a gripping and utterly unpredictable plot that unites all three novels.